eVGA UV Plus 16

Do not mistake the UV16 for a sunscreen SPF rating. More monitors in front of you means the exact opposite.

This is the EVGA UV16 display adapter. It's got a USB port on one end and a DVI connector on the other. Which is good news for anyone who wants to hang loads of monitors (under a 1680*1050 resolution) off their system after running out of old PCI video cards.

The hardware itself works as an interface bridge that makes your processor emulate a graphics card, then sends the output to the box via USB. Think software RAID or onboard sound cards and you're basically there. So yes, you will need the drivers and software that come on the disc with the UV Plus -- even under Vista.

Once you've installed the software and restarted, an option for an extra monitor with all the usual settings and options will appear in your display settings. An icon will appear in your tray that will give you all the options you can already get to through your display settings anyway, as well as screen rotation which is useful and cool if you can rotate your monitor 90 degrees.

Because the hardware design is constrained by the USB bus, there are no kinds of acceleration onboard and you should expect to see it chew up your system resources when you need it to render anything intensive to the monitor. We didn't have any issues playing back any format video, but there sure are bitrate constraints you'll have to take into account if you're planning to play back video on a monitor attached to the UV16.

Playing back a DVD (on an admittedly bloated system running Vista) yielded a dropped frame every few seconds in Media Player Classic and in VLC's full screen mode. 1:1 windowed playback in VLC was better, but still dropped an occasional frame. (NB: VLC is not an adequate substitute to learning about desktop video and how to install codecs properly.)

So what use is it? Hooking up an additional monitor to your laptop, or just getting a digital video signal out of it (I say thinking of my EeePC that I haven't used in weeks because the power supply's dead and I can't find my receipt) is a start.

But more interesting would be a monitor explosion on your desk, for fun and the side effect of making some programs easier to navigate. Spreading the many, many (many) panels that Adobe’s After Effects usually hides -- even on two 1920 * 1200 monitors -- over an image wall springs to mind. But the idea of going nuts with a Flight Sim cockpit and loads of monitors scattered everywhere will do it for some people.

It’s versatile and shiny, and if you consider $130 to be a good deal, you’re in business.

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